It was as she was dripping, naked, struggling to make sense of the plastic curtain, that a knife slashed it through with a single stroke. Before she could reach for a scream it had been ripped to one side, and when at last she tried to scream she found her lungs paralysed. Standing in front of her were two men. Hoods. One had her carving knife in his hand.
‘Make noise and you will never make noise again,’ the knife man said in accented English.
A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind, and then a thousand more. She had no doubt she could end up dead. How she reacted was crucial to whether in ten minutes’ time she would still be alive, but that told her nothing. What should she do? Scream? Be compliant? Fall on her knees and sob? But she was totally vulnerable, naked, her body shaking as she tried to take in her situation. Would they rape, or were they here simply to steal? But she was just a hard-up primary school teacher, for God’s sake, she had nothing worth stealing. So she knew they would rape her.
Submit? Struggle? Get it over with, or try to show them that she was better than them? Someone had once told her that letting her bowels loose would put off an attack, but she couldn’t control a muscle. She was astonished at what thoughts sped through her mind.
‘What . . . do . . . you want,’ she uttered eventually, shaking.
They said nothing, but took an arm each, dragged her from the bath and threw her onto the bed. She lay there, didn’t protest, her legs spread apart, didn’t bother trying to close them. This wasn’t a time for gestures, she had to concentrate on what might make a difference. They used a silk scarf and the cord for her dressing gown to tie her hands to the white metal bedhead. She tried to study their eyes, their weights, body shapes, their smell, hoping she might recognize them again.
Once she was secured, Knife Man leaned over her, his blade flashing in front of her eyes. He put it to her forehead, she could feel its cold bite. ‘You want knife here – or here?’ He dragged it, very slowly, down her body, the blade hesitating at her most vulnerable points, her eyes, lips, breasts, until it was resting between her legs. He used it to shave her.
Then, for the first time, the other man spoke. ‘Jemma, let the dead rest in peace.’
That was when she knew they were going to kill her. Yet neither of them moved.
‘You understand?’ he continued.
The other man shaved her a little more, and more roughly.
‘They do not need you knocking on their doors.’
Suddenly she knew. They were warning her off. The plane crash.
‘I . . . understand.’ She couldn’t manage more than one word at a time.
‘Excellent.’
They stood back. Knife Man was admiring his handiwork. She had never felt more naked in her entire life.
‘If you mention this to the police, we will come back and hurt you,’ the other man said. There was no emotion in it, all a matter of everyday fact, as if they did this every night of the week and were almost a little bored.
She was shaking now, her body trembling on the bed. They weren’t going to rape her after all?
‘A warning. You understand?’
She nodded her head.
‘Good. Friends.’ He nodded to Knife Man, who sliced through the silk scarf, leaving her secured only by the heavily knotted cord.
And they left. They didn’t even bother closing the front door. She could hear them laughing as they went down the stairs.
When eventually she managed to unravel the knot, she lay on the bed and cried as she hadn’t done since the day her brother had died.
Harry rushed to her, a man pursued by demons he thought had gone from his life but that had been resurrected by her phone call. He threw a twenty at the taxi driver, didn’t wait for the change, and took the stairs three at a time. Her door was still open. Experience told him to pause before he burst in, to look for signs, in case they were still there, but there was nothing. Then he saw Jemma sitting on the end of her bed. Her head was bowed, her dressing gown wrapped roughly around her, its cord on the floor. He threw himself down on his knees in front of her, tried to embrace her; she sat stiff, rigid, as though hewn of rock. Her voice, when it emerged from its hiding place, was no more than a whisper.
‘They told me to keep away from the crash.’
The words hit him like a sledgehammer. ‘Did they hurt you? Jemma! What did they do?’
Slowly,mechanically, she drew back the folds of her dressing gown to reveal the mess they had made of her most intimate parts, then she let the gown fall back again.
‘Jem, Jem, I’m so sorry . . .’
But she wouldn’t say any more. No tears, not yet, no further words, everything locked away deep inside.
He said he was going to call the police but suddenly she snatched at him, held his arm with ferocious strength, and shook her head.
‘Why not?’ he asked, but he already knew. She was terrified they would come back. It was reckoned that the vast majority of sexual assaults on women go unreported in the London Metropolitan Police area. This would be another. She fell back on the bed and began to shake uncontrollably.
He went to the kitchen, found a tub of hot chocolate, made a mug and loaded it with extra sugar, then sat with her as she sipped it.
‘Would you recognize them again?’ he ventured, knowing he had to ask, not wanting to make her relive the nightmare.
‘I tried, Harry,’ she began, revived by the chocolate, ‘to see if there was anything about them that was different.’ She shook her head, it seemed too much, but then: ‘One had blue eyes. Both were young. And fit, very strong.’ They had left raw marks on her wrist where they had dragged her to the bed. ‘And they were foreign. Accents.’
‘Try to remember precisely what they said.’
‘One of them – the one with the knife. Awful grammar. Kept dropping the definite article. “The” or “a” or whatever he should have said.’ She was still trembling, and struggling, fighting to recapture every word before they became scrambled in her mind, while Harry tried to smooth encouragement into her hands with his thumbs. ‘They laughed as they went down the stairs. Joking. About my body. My breasts. I could hear them. “Dermo, we should have tranoot her,” that’s what the one with the knife said. Words I didn’t understand, but I can guess what they meant.’ Suddenly, she drew back from him. ‘Hey, you’re hurting me!’
His thumbs had dug themselves deep into the palm of her hands. ‘You sure? Are you sure that’s what they said? Jem, this is very important.’
‘Of course,’ she said, resentful, pulling her hands away. ‘I spend every hour of my working day trying to figure out what five- and six-year-olds are saying. You get an ear for it. Of course I’m sure.’
He pulled himself from the floor and came to sit on the bed beside her. ‘Damn them,’ he muttered.
‘Damn who, Harry?’
‘Dropping the definite article. And those words. “Trahnouti”. Means “fucked”. It’s Russian.’
‘But I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘But what are you saying – Ghazi, Russians, Brussels? What the hell does it all mean?’
He shook his head. He hadn’t a clue. Jemma had been assaulted and terrified – but for what?
Now she started to cry, releasing the anger and humiliation through her tears that fell onto Harry’s shoulder and stained his jacket. He sat beside her, holding her, trying to give her comfort, finding none for himself. This was his fault. And, as he looked into her eyes, he could see that she thought so too.
To destroy a good man, it is only necessary to take his reputation. And that is what Patricia Vaine had decided to do. Her attack on Harry had started as a means of defence, of protecting herself, but she had begun to enjoy the aroma of power and it had caused her to cross a line without her realizing she had done so. It was some time before she would accept that pursuing Harry had become a professional pleasure. That pursuit was made all the easier because Harry had no idea that he was ev
en a target, not until he discovered that his credit card had stopped working.
In its rush to clear up as much business as possible before the election, Parliament was sitting ball-breaking hours, beside which there were a thousand other distractions, with demands from his constituency, when most of all he wanted to be with Jemma. It didn’t help that Jemma showed a marked reluctance to spend much time with him, saying she wanted time on her own, to heal, to reflect. That only made his sense of guilt worse. Torn in three directions. Even Harry Jones wasn’t up to that.
And in the game of battleships and broadsides that make up every constituency campaign, Zafira Bagshot had landed a direct hit. Harry was woken up early one Thursday morning by a call from the chairman of his constituency party, Oscar Colville.
‘Who pulled your chain, Oscar?’ Harry grumbled, scrabbling for his wristwatch. Six-thirty. And he hadn’t got to bed before two.
‘Sorry, Harry. I truly am. I take full responsibility. It’s my fault.’
‘What is?’
‘The screw-up over St Mary’s.’
Harry groaned, struggling to recollect an early philosophy lesson that had suggested the world was imagination and might cease to exist if you kept your eyes closed. He tried it; didn’t work. ‘School or hospital?’
‘Both.’
There had been a point where St Mary’s had boasted both a school and a hospital, but both had fallen casualty to the campaign of cuts. Inevitable. No easy solution. Inherited problem. All the usual clichés had been marched before the public and put on parade, but very few had saluted. Even statistics that showed you had a considerably better chance of surviving any number of medical emergencies in the new, larger but more distant hospital hadn’t won the day; the hospital and school had served the community for generations, and if they had been good enough for fathers and grandfathers, they should be there for grandsons, too. So Harry had made the argument, ducked, and moved on. The adjacent sites had now been cleared and made ready for the construction of a new business park, the sorry matter forgotten – or so he had hoped.
Yet, according to an uncharacteristically subdued and hesitant Oscar, the front page of the local newspaper that was about to flood the streets of the constituency was dominated by a photograph of Ms Bagshot, standing in the middle of the building site, her arms outstretched in the preacher position, beneath a headline that screamed: ‘Harry’s Howler.’
‘It was the press pack, you see.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Harry replied bluntly.
‘We put together a press pack for the campaign. Usual stuff, to brief any visiting journalist about the wonders of the constituency. Look, Harry, I truly am sorry . . .’
‘Oscar, wait. Slow down. What the bloody hell are you talking about?’
‘Emily, she did the draft. Very well, we all thought. Updating the one we put out at the last election.’
‘When we still had St Mary’s,’ Harry sighed, coming to enlightenment.
‘I proofread it, but . . . Harry, you know how many distractions there are, particularly with the Prime Minister getting his tail in such a tangle.’
‘You’re telling me that the press pack went out—’
‘Proclaiming the virtues of the community hospital and school.’
A hospital and school that had been bulldozed two years ago only after picket lines had been pushed aside by the local constabulary.
‘She’s being very unfair, your opponent,’ Oscar continued, blustering, not even wanting to use her name. ‘She’s said you are not only an absentee landlord but in danger of sounding like the village idiot.’
It was a mixed metaphor, but Harry could see where she was coming from.
‘What’s to be done?’ Oscar pleaded. ‘I’ll resign, if it helps. Blame me.’
‘No, Oscar, thanks but . . . I’ll put out an apology.’ He sighed, stretched, ached. ‘And we’ll just have to work twice as hard.’
Which was precisely what he proceeded to do when he travelled to his constituency the next day, Friday. Tramping the streets with his band of volunteers, knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, getting fingers squashed in letterboxes like bear traps, listening, explaining, trying to assess the state of play. It was gone seven and darkness had fallen before they stopped. Harry invited them all for a pub supper, fifteen in all, and while they were eating he toured the bars, chatting to old friends, hoping to make some that were new, and braving the inevitable ribbing about ‘Harry’s Howler’.
The bill came to nearly three hundred pounds. His card didn’t work. The reader refused to accept it. The landlord tried a second time. Same result.
‘You drowned it in cheap red wine or something?’ Harry asked.
‘Been working fine all day,’ the landlord replied, perplexed.
Harry tried a different card, and two others. They were all declined.
‘Some screw-up,’ Harry muttered, his mouth growing dry with embarrassment. He looked into his wallet, but he didn’t have that much cash. ‘I’ll go to a machine, be back in a few minutes.’
‘No worries, Harry, next time you’re in,’ the landlord said. ‘Pity’s sake, after all these years, I know you’re good for it.’
But when eventually he shoved his cards into an ATM, once more every one of them was rejected. Insufficient funds. And when he tried yet again, the machine retained the card and instructed him to refer to his bank. But how could he? It was Friday evening. Late. Miserable. And dark. He wouldn’t be able to scream at anyone until Monday morning. He intended to do exactly that, but in the meantime, as an interim measure, he pounded the console in frustration. Useless bloody thing. The machine was telling him he was broke.
CHAPTER TEN
If he hadn’t had enough cash in his wallet to pay for petrol, Harry wasn’t sure how he would have made it back home on Sunday evening. He felt lonely and lifeless as he kicked across the stack of mail that had accumulated inside his front door. He swept it up, intending to sort it into piles of varying urgency, when he was silly enough to switch on his laptop. There were more than a hundred and fifty new e-mail messages waiting for him, quite apart from the backlog. He cursed, switched it off and threw the post into a pile in the corner. He wished Jemma had been waiting for him, but she was spending the weekend with her parents. So instead he picked up the whisky bottle. It had been a bloody awful week. He had never expected a life in politics to be an easy touch, but right now he’d have swapped it to be back under fire from Saddam’s Revolutionary Guard on the outskirts of Baghdad. That had left him with a bullet hole through his shoulder and, right now, that seemed like a better choice from a safer world.
He slept badly, rose early, impatient, but no one at the bank was going to answer before ten o’clock. He made sure his was the first call.
‘Tom? This is Harry Jones.’
‘I was wondering when you’d contact us,’ the private client manager said.
‘So you’ve spotted the screw-up in my accounts, too, have you? What the bloody hell’s going on?’
There was a silence before the other man spoke, and when he did, his voice was measured, almost over-controlled, as if he was trying to calm a wild cat. ‘Harry, I can’t talk to you. You know I can’t.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘The letters we’ve sent.’
‘What letters?’ Harry said, eyeing the pile in the corner. He hadn’t opened a bank statement in months, as was the privilege of the super-wealthy, particularly when they were spectacularly busy.
‘We’ve sent you e-mails’ – the laptop glowered at Harry from near at hand – ‘I’ve even left messages asking you to call.’
‘Those? Tom, I thought you were phoning to arrange lunch.’
A silence of confusion filled the space between them.
‘Tom, I’ve been banking with you for how many years? I haven’t got a squashed gnat’s idea what the bloody hell you’re talking about.’
When he spoke again, the bank man’s voice wa
s more contrite. ‘Harry, your account has been handed up the line to head office. Recoveries Department. I can’t touch it or help you any more. Look, you know what it’s been like since the Crash, everything is run by machines and mindless codes of conduct. I hate it, truly I do.’
But Harry knew Tom wasn’t going to pack it in, and why should he, at the age of forty-seven with three kids and a subsidized mortgage?
‘If only you’d been in touch earlier I might have been able to help you with your problem,’ the bank man continued.
‘Problem? I have a problem?’
‘You really don’t know?’
Harry had never taken money for granted; you didn’t, not when you’d pushed yourself through uni on a diet of stale burger buns. Yet since his father had died, fortune had flowed upon Harry like snow in Santa’s grotto. He had enough, more than enough. He could take a hit. ‘Tell me I’m down to my last couple of million.’
The bank man sounded wretched. ‘Harry, you’re bust.’
‘I can’t be. Don’t be preposterous.’
‘I’m so very sorry, Harry.’
He was left speechless, scrabbling to understand. ‘This is asinine, some ludicrous practical joke.’
Silence.
‘A mistake. Has to be. For pity’s sake, Tom, what the hell are you trying to tell me – that I’m in the shit?’
‘Harry, you are in it so deep you disappeared several weeks ago.’
It might have been handled better, and perhaps would have been, but for the Crash. It had left the banks owing so many billions that they could have filled every crater on the moon, and as far as most people knew, that’s precisely where all the money had gone. It had destroyed the banks’ reputation, and along with it their patience, despite the fact that it was taxpayers’ money that had saved them. You can drag the bankers out of the shit, but as for dragging the shit out of the bankers, that was one miracle that had yet to be performed.